With the requirements for development of sustainable solutions for provision of fuels, chemicals and materials, there is much focus on biotechnology, as this may serve as one of the pillars underlying a modern, sustainable society. Biotechnology has been used for generations in the production of fermented beverages and food products, and in the last 60 years for the production of antibiotics, food ingredients and feed additives. In recent years, several new processes for production of chemicals that can be used for polymer production have been introduced, and the production of bioethanol for fuel use has increased rapidly. Currently, there is extensive research on the development of novel cell factories for the production of chemicals and novel fuels, and it is expected that this will lead to implementation of several new biotech processes in the coming years.
The core of this development is the design and construction of cell factories that can ensure efficient conversion of the raw material to the product of interest. Traditionally, microorganisms that naturally produce a desired molecule were identified and then improved through classical strain engineering based on mutagenesis and screening. This has been a very effective approach and has resulted in low-cost production processes for many different chemicals, e.g. penicillin, citric acid and lysine. With the introduction of genetic engineering and methods for detailed analysis of cellular metabolism it became possible to use a more directed approach to improve cell factories, generally referred to as metabolic engineering. Today metabolic engineering has evolved into a research field that encompasses detailed metabolic analysis with the objective to identify targets for metabolic engineering and the implementation of metabolic engineering strategies for improvement and/or design of novel cell factories. In recent years, synthetic biology has emerged as another research field that originally aimed at reconstruction of small, artificial biological systems, e.g. assembling a new biological regulon or oscillators that can be used to regulate gene expression in response to a specific input. But synthetic biology also includes the synthesis of DNA and complete chromosomes as illustrated in a recent work on reconstruction of a complete bacterial chromosome.